Lionel Shriver
THE MANDIBLES
A FAMILY, 2029–2047
TO BRADFORD HALL WILLIAMS.
Although you had little time for fiction, you’d have liked this book. Who would have imagined that a cantankerous misanthrope would be so fiercely missed?
Collapse is a sudden, involuntary and chaotic form of simplification.
2029
• CHAPTER 1 •
GRAY WATER
“Don’t use clean water to wash your hands!”
Intended as a gentle reminder, the admonishment came out shrill. Florence didn’t want to seem like what her son would call a boomerpoop, but still—the rules of the household were simple. Esteban consistently flouted them. There were ways of establishing that you weren’t under any (somewhat) older woman’s thumb without wasting water. He was such a cripplingly handsome man that she’d let him get away with almost anything else.
“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned,” Esteban muttered, dipping his hands into the plastic tub in the sink that caught runoff. Shreds of cabbage floated around the rim.
“That doesn’t make sense, does it?” Florence said. “When you’ve already used the clean, to use the gray?”
“Only doing what I’m told,” her partner said.
“That’s a first.”
“What’s put you in such a good mood?” Esteban wiped his now-greasy hands on an even greasier dishtowel (another rule: a roll of paper towels lasts six weeks). “Something go wrong at Adelphi?”
“Things go nothing but wrong at Adelphi,” she grumbled. “Drugs, fights, theft. Screaming babies with eczema. That’s what homeless shelters are like. Honestly, I’m bewildered by why it’s so hard to get the residents to flush the toilet. Which is the height of luxury, in this house.”
“I wish you’d find something else.”
“I do, too. But don’t tell anybody. It would ruin my sainted reputation.” Florence returned to slicing cabbage—an economical option even at twenty bucks. She wasn’t sure how much more of the vegetable her son could stand.
Others were always agog at the virtuousness of her having taken on such a demanding, thankless job for four long years. But assumptions about her angelic nature were off base. After she’d scraped from one poorly paid, often part-time position to another, whatever wide-eyed altruism had motivated her moronic double major in American Studies and Environmental Policy at Barnard had been beaten out of her almost entirely. Half her jobs had been eliminated because an innovation became abruptly obsolete; she’d worked for a company that sold electric long underwear to save on heating bills, and then suddenly consumers only wanted heated underwear backed by electrified graphene. Other positions were eliminated by what in her twenties were called bots, but which displaced American workers now called robs, for obvious reasons. Her most promising position was at a start-up that made tasty protein bars out of cricket powder. Yet once Hershey’s mass-produced a similar but notoriously oily product, the market for insect-based snacks tanked. So when she came across a post in a city shelter in Fort Greene, she’d applied from a combination of desperation and canniness: the one thing New York City was bound never to run out of was homeless people.
“Mom?” Willing asked quietly in the doorway. “Isn’t it my turn for a shower?”
Her thirteen-year-old had last bathed only five days ago, and knew full well they were all allotted one shower per week (they went through cases of comb-in dry shampoo). Willing complained, too, that standing under their ultra-conservation showerhead was like “going for a walk in the fog.” True, the fine spray made it tricky to get conditioner out, but then the answer wasn’t to use more water. It was to stop using conditioner.
“Maybe not quite yet… but go ahead,” she relented. “Don’t forget to turn off the water while you’re soaping up.”
“I get cold.” His delivery was flat. It wasn’t a complaint. It was a fact.
“I’ve read that shivering is good for your metabolism,” Florence said.
“Then my metabolism must be awesome,” Willing said dryly, turning heel. The mockery of her dated vernacular wasn’t fair. She’d learned ages ago to say malicious.
“If you’re right, and this water thing will only get worse?” Esteban said, taking down plates for dinner. “Might as well open the taps full-on while we can.”
“I do sometimes fantasize about long, hot showers,” Florence confessed.
“Oh, yeah?” He encircled her waist from behind as she cored another cabbage wedge. “Deep inside this tight, bossy choirgirl is a hedonist trying to get out.”
“God, I used to bask under a torrent, with the water hot as I could bear. When I was a teenager, the condensation got so bad once that I ruined the bathroom’s paint job.”
“That’s the sexiest thing you’ve ever told me,” he whispered in her ear.
“Well, that’s depressing.”
He laughed. His work entailed lifting often-stout elderly bodies in and out of mobility scooters—mobes, if you were remotely hip—and it kept him in shape. She could feel his pecs and abdominal muscles tense against her back. Tired, certainly, and she might be all of forty-four, but that made her a spring chicken these days, and the sensation was stirring. They had good sex. Either it was a Mexican thing or he was simply a man apart, but unlike all the other guys she’d known, Esteban hadn’t been raised on a steady diet of porn since he was five. He had a taste for real women.
Not that Florence thought of herself as a great catch. Her younger sister had bagged the looks. Avery was dark and delicately curved, with that trace of fragility men found so fetching. Sinewy and strong simply from keeping busy, narrow-hipped and twitchy, with a long face and a mane of scraggly auburn hair eternally escaping the bandana she wore pirate-style to keep the unruly tendrils out of the way, Florence had often been characterized as “horsey.” She’d interpreted the adjective as pejorative, until Esteban latched on to the descriptor with affection, slapping the haunches of his high-strung filly. Maybe you could do worse than to look like a horse.
“See, I got a whole different philosophy,” Esteban mumbled into her neck. “Ain’t gonna be no more fish? Stuff your face with Chilean sea bass like there’s no tomorrow.”
“The danger of there being no tomorrow is the point.” The school-marmish tut-tut was tempered with self-parody; she knew her stern, upright facade got on his nerves. “And if everyone’s reaction to water scarcity is to take half-hour showers ‘while they can,’ we’ll run out of water even sooner. But if that’s not good enough for you? Water is expensive. Immense expensive, as the kids say.”
He let go of her waist. “Mi querida, you’re such a drear. If the Stonage taught us anything, it’s that the world can go to hell in a snap. In the little gaps between disasters, might as well try to have fun.”
He had a point. She’d intended to eke out this pound of ground pork through two meals; it was their first red meat for a month. After Esteban’s urging to seize the day, she decided rashly on one-time portions of five ounces apiece, dizzy with profligacy and abandon until she caught herself: we are supposed to be middle class.